All posts tagged Katyn

The first anniversary of the plane crash that killed Poland’s president in western Russia was overshadowed by a decision by Russian officials to unilaterally change a memorial plaque at the crash site to delete a phrase banned during the Soviet era. Read More »

Nearly half a year after the plane crash in Russia that killed Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others, the bits and pieces of the aircraft­ — property of Poland — are still in Russia, windswept and rain-lashed on the tarmac of a provincial airport.

The Polish government now appears to be turning up the heat on Moscow, publicly insisting the wreckage belongs in Poland.

“In line with international law, the Polish state is the owner of the aircraft, even of what remains after the crash. The remains of the aircraft should be brought to Poland as soon as possible,” Poland’s Justice Minister Krzysztof Kwiatkowski said Wednesday.

The Polish president and his delegation died on their way to Katyn, in western Russia, for a commemoration of more than 20,000 Polish soldiers killed there on Stalin’s orders during World War II.

The strongly sympathetic reaction from Russia to the crash that shocked the Polish nation has led to a slight warming of relations between two countries that usually treat each other with the utmost suspicion. But despite the improvement in tone and talk of a possible visit to Poland this year by Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev, Poland has been unable to persuade the Russian side to protect the remains of the disintegrated airplane, even with just a tent. Read More »

Questions continue to swirl about the circumstances that led to the April crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others. Broadcaster TVN24, a respected Polish news station, is reporting that Polish authorities have managed to decipher more of the cockpit conversation captured by the plane’s voice recorder. What they found appears to indicate significant pressure on the pilot to land the plane, bound for a memorial ceremony in Russia, despite heavy fog and extremely limited visibility.

“If I don’t land, they’ll kill me” or “If we don’t land, he’ll kill me,” the pilot said at one point, several minutes before the plane crashed while attempting to land at a military airport in Smolensk in western Russia on April 10, TVN24 reported Wednesday. A transcript of discussions among crew members and others in the cockpit prepared by Russian investigators and released in June had said that portion of the recording was impossible to understand because of background noise.

There has been no official confirmation of the TVN24 report, with prosecutors on the case declining to comment. Read More »

A group of Russian dissidents and Kremlin critics said in an open letter Tuesday that Poland gives too much credit to Russia by not asking any questions about Russia’s investigation into the April crash that killed the Polish president.

Russian-Polish relations have for years been spectacularly bad as both countries fought for influence in the post-Soviet countries of eastern Europe and the Caucasus and Poland asserted it independence. Current disagreements over energy and military plans continue to cloud the relationship already marred by historic disputes, especially over the Soviet Union’s brutal domination of nations in central and eastern Europe in the 20th century.

A direct legal successor to the Soviet Union, Russia was cautiously making friendlier gestures in the Polish direction just days before the April 10 plane crash near the western Russian city of Smolensk, in which Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others were killed when their airplane crashed on approach in thick fog. The officials were en route to a ceremony to remember Polish officers killed on Stalin’s orders in World War II.

The Russian leadership reacted to the crash with a series of unprecedented moves that have led to a warming of the deep-frozen relations with Poland. For the first time in the Putin era, the country admitted Stalin’s responsibility for the massacre.

But the Polish government’s decision to leave the investigation in the hands of Russian prosecutors has led to controversy and concern that Russia could try to cover up its own mistakes in the handling of the president’s visit, considered private and low-key by the Russian authorities. Read More »

The Polish-Russian relationship has been extremely difficult over the past centuries. Poland captured the Kremlin in the 17th century and tried to install an impostor as a Russian tsar. Russia, in its attempts to expand westward, annexed parts of Poland and for more than a century the tsars brutally ruled what they eventually called „The Vistula Land” or Privislinsky Krai as it tried to wipe out Poland not only from the map, but also from the Russian language.

Then came the 20th century with the Polish-Soviet war, the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact in which Stalin and Hitler split Poland among themselves, and the long decades of Soviet dominance. This has created a very difficult relationship in which any progress that you couldn’t even see without a magnifying glass seems like it takes forever.

Richard Pipes, the Polish-born American Sovietologist, said last night that President Lech Kaczynski’s tragic death in Russia will further deteriorate the already difficult Polish-Russian relationship. He’s one of the very few to be saying that as Poland mourns its leader.

“Even though I’m convinced Russians are not to blame, this catastrophe will deteriorate Polish-Russian relations,” he said.

„If this catastrophe took place in France, it wouldn’t have any influence on mutual relations. But because this happened in Russia and at the site of the Katyn tragedy, from the psychological point of view it will be completely understandable that Poles will hold it against Russians,” Pipes told the daily.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski was en route to the Saturday commemoration of the Katyn Massacre in western Russia when his airplane crashed killing all on board. The Stalin-ordered execution of Polish elites 70 years ago in a forest near Smolensk continues to be a bone of contention in current relations between Poland, which calls the massacre “genocide” and wants access to all documents on the matter, and Russia, which calls it “events” and refuses to officially rehabilitate the victims. Read More »

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